This Snake-Looking Robot Could Be Used to Dig Holes on the Moon and Jupiter

The answer is a type of soft burrowing robot that has the sneakiness and looks of a snake but uses human-made technology. It is the creation of researchers at the UC Santa Barbara in collaboration with Georgia’s Institute of Technology. Nowadays, everyone’s into robotics more than ever, and they’re using them for all sorts of operations. These machines have taken over the air, the sea, and the land. But there’s still a frontier left to explore: the underground.

So the team of engineers created a soft robot that looks like a snake and can burrow through sand, making it suitable for subterranean exploration and investigation. The biggest challenge with making a robot that can dig through sand is coming up with a way to beat the forces involved, because, unlike air and water, the subterranean offers a great deal of resistance.

So the scientists got their inspiration from other master diggers in the natural world. Their burrowing machine is equipped with a tip extension out of which air is blown. That air excavates and fluidizes the sand around the tip, reducing that resistive force and helping the robot dig its way through. This process is called granular fluidization and suspends the particles in a fluid-like state so that the animal (or robot in our case) can overcome the high level of resistance presented by the sand, as explained by the researchers.

The team believes their new machine can enable new capabilities for extraterrestrial robotics. They have already started working on a project for NASA. In the future, the snake robot could be used to dig on the Moon, Jupiter, and other distant bodies.